


the green place

by owlinaminor



Series: author's favorites [15]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies), Mad Max: Fury Road
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Post-Movie, Rebuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-18
Updated: 2015-06-18
Packaged: 2018-04-04 22:44:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4155798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/owlinaminor/pseuds/owlinaminor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>I live again.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	the green place

**Author's Note:**

> to the surprise of literally nobody, I walked out of the theater after seeing mad max: fury road completely in love with imperator furiosa as a character, as a concept, and as a woman. this was just the natural result.
> 
> thanks to [becky](http://dicaeopolis.tumblr.com/) for proof-reading.

> “So she sat on the porch and watched the moon rise. Soon its amber fluid was drenching the earth, and quenching the thirst of the day.” – _Their Eyes Were Watching God_ , Zora Neale Hurston

Furiosa returns home.

It feels strange, to think of the Citadel as home.  It feels surreal, like a mirage in the desert on a day so hot your imagination conjures up water in the frail hope that the thought can somehow quench your thirst.   _Home,_ she whispers, looking out upon the grass-topped cliffs and the beggars grasping at her feet.  The word leaves a metallic taste in her mouth.

And surely, this must be home, if she returned.  Furiosa stares out – out and out and out, at the War Boys without a leader and the Wives without a husband and the water without a prison guard and the sky that surely has never been this clear before – as though if she looks hard enough, she can banish all thoughts of the green place from her mind.  That place is dead.  Perhaps it never existed.  Perhaps she built it herself, a place too beautiful to exist in this mad world.

All around her, people are cheering.  They celebrate the death of Immortan Joe.  They celebrate her return.  It takes long seconds before she realizes that they are chanting her name.

She wants to ask them why they cheer for her.  Yes, she killed Immortan Joe – but she allowed him to live first.

* * *

 Furiosa recovers fast.

She has to, of course.  She’s always had to.  Ever since her mother left her alone in a strange new world where one man gets his way and questions are punishable by death, she’s known how to bite her lip, close her eyes, and keep any screaming inside her mind.  She wills her body to obey her – refuses to take no for an answer, the same way Immortan Joe does when he stares down one of his Wives – and sometimes it’s a few moments before it responds, but it always does.  Her eyes open, her brain kicks into high gear, her limbs move.

This time, she has more time to heal – she has space to lie down, time to rest, people to help her – but she still can’t stand stillness for more than a few hours before she’s on her feet.  Her head is spinning and her pulse is shaky, but she stands.  She stands and eyes the people around her, waiting for someone to make a move.

And then, they – the Wives, or Immortan Joe’s remaining lieutenants, or someone else, she isn’t sure – are pushing her out onto the balcony, expecting her to give a speech.

Her?  Furiosa?  A speech?  She was trained to fight, not to speak.  She can string words together easily enough for commands, sharp and demanding – but paragraphs are almost entirely foreign to her.  She remembers Joe’s talk of glory and greater good, tries to mold those thundering deliverances to her own goals.

And yet, Furiosa’s goals are so far from Joe’s.  He wanted power and immortality – she only wants life, for herself and all of the people suddenly depending on her.  Her words can be simple, she decides.  If the people of the Citadel don’t like that, they can find a new leader.

She looks out upon them.  They’re dizzying, these hordes of uplifted faces below her, this chorus of voices chanting her name.  Dizzying, but no more terrifying than everything else she’s survived.

Furiosa spreads her arms wide as an eagle’s, and the chanting stops.  Almost like magic.

* * *

_“People of the Citadel!  You’ve survived this long.  Good for you - that’s not easy.  Now, you all want me to be a leader.  I’ll try my best.  But I can’t do anything good unless you work, too.  I am not Immortan Joe.  I don’t care about glory in the next life.  I just want to live in this one.  I hope you all want the same.  Now, what are you all standing around for?  Get to work!  I mean it - go!”_

* * *

Furiosa wakes up suffocating.

Nightmares are nothing new – since the day she was snatched from her homeland they have haunted her, pulling arms and malicious laughter – but she is unused to this new loneliness.  When she sat up, panting, in her old tiny bed, she was surrounded by the other Imperators, each of them haunted by their own demons.  There was something oddly comforting in knowing that they were all plagued – not by the same diseases, perhaps, but plagued nonetheless.

Yet here and now, she wakes in a bed wide enough for all of the Imperators together.  There is no rhythmic breathing to remind her that the booming explosions and fading futures of her imagination are all far behind her.  She was given Immortan Joe’s old inner chambers, led in dutifully by one of his remaining sons, and found herself too shocked to refuse, much as she does not deserve to sleep here.

Furiosa sits up one night, decides that sleep is futile, and jumps down from the bed.  She pads softly across Joe’s wide rooms, the softly gleaming floor too smooth beneath her bare feet.  There is finery here from some long-forgotten era, strange metals bent into shapes that she doesn’t know the names for.  She feels like a foreigner from a far-off land, permitted to visit for one night only.  Any minute now, Joe will come crashing through the door and demand his power back – and what will she be able to say in her defense?  She doesn’t belong here.  She probably never will.

There is an instrument near one wall, large and black like an engineered plume of smoke.  Furiosa has never touched it before, afraid that it might swallow her up or infect her with madness.  But now, she runs curious fingers along its polished edges, inspects it as she might a new gun.  She presses down on one of its white teeth and – and a sound comes out, half startling and half beautiful.

Furiosa remembers music.  It’s a far-off dream, pulled from beyond her imagination, but it is so lovely it can only be real.  Her mother once sang to her, she’s sure of it.  She sits at that instrument for hours, trying key after key until she can pick out the melody.

And once she plays it all the way through, she lays her head down on the black surface and sullies Joe’s polished property with her tears.

* * *

 Furiosa learns to lead.

No, that isn’t true.  She learns to follow.  She learns, more and more each day, how much there is that she doesn’t know – about farming, about mining, about living.  So much of Old Joe’s equipment is completely foreign to her, and even when his former lieutenants try to explain it, they speak in a language she doesn’t understand.  And, more than that, there are people to talk to, conflicts to resolve, weather patterns to curse.  More and more each day, she wonders at how Joe managed to deal with all of this on his own.

But Furiosa didn’t become Joe’s prize Imperator for nothing.  She can adapt, she can learn.  She becomes expert in the field of delegation.  The Dag takes over agriculture, sowing seeds in all the soil she can find.  Capable creates something of a judicial system, listening to quarrels calmly and fairly.  Toast gathers all the old books from Joe’s rooms and all the old people who think they might remember something useful and puts them together into a school, teaching anyone who wishes to learn how to read, write, and think for themselves.  Cheedo decides to run a day-care center for the children, Joe’s and not Joe’s – she asks Furiosa for permission to use her new room, and Furiosa is more than willing to give it.  And there are more: the haggard Vuvalini set up a place of healing, and Ace, her old second in command, runs his building shop like a well-oiled machine, and one of the Milking Mothers learns to head a kitchen, and a hundred others step forward to take a hundred other positions.  No hands are left empty at the Citadel now, and no minds are left unchallenged - but no hearts are left unfilled.

They are building something here, Furiosa knows it.  The War Boys no longer have wars to fight, and they give their half-lives willingly to the Citadel.  Harvests are plentiful more often than they are barren.  Every day, more children are being born, and none of them were sired by Old Joe.  The people thank Furiosa for these changes – they see her as standing on top of a green-topped cliff, dictating good fortune with a magic wand – but she knows that she is only standing and watching as others work.  She is only encouraging them to do their best by telling them that they must live.

Soon enough, war parties will come from the East and the South to scavenge the civilization built from Old Joe’s bones.  Furiosa can see their dust clouds clear on the horizon – she knows that they cannot be allowed to venture close.  She gathers the remaining Imperators, draws up defense plans.  Strategy is one thing she knows – strategy, loyalty, strength.

She cannot take credit for the rise of this new Citadel, but she can stop anyone who might try to take it from her.

* * *

Furiosa finally finds her green place.

One morning, she wakes in her great bed to sunlight streaming in through the wide windows like a blessing.  There are children sitting on the floor, led by Cheedo in a quiet game of hide-and-seek.  The Dag is perched on the bench of the great piano, sketching intently.  A couple of older women are clustered in a corner, peering at the pages of an old book.

And outside the windows – the Citadel is waking up, stretching its arms, preparing for the day ahead.  Soon, the wheels will begin to turn and the crops will await tending.  Water will flow easily from the pipes.  Children will play.  War Boys will smile.  Girls will run without fear.

Girls will run without fear.

Furiosa lies in bed, her face turned to the sun, and thinks of all of the _life_ in the Citadel this day, just ripe for the living – and something rises in her chest.  Something warm and light and unfamiliar, bubbling or dancing or perhaps even floating.  It feels strange, but not painfully so.

It feels like hope.

 

**Author's Note:**

> hit me up on [tumblr](http://gratuitytuccci.tumblr.com/) if you want to talk more about queen furiosa. (or any of the other mad max ladies. they're cool, too.)


End file.
